UPDATED: Harper's Reign Of Terror - Part 2

Yesterday I wrote a post on the war being conducted by Stephen Harper and his cadre against dissent in Canada. Specifically, the Prime Minister is diverting CRA resources and taxpayer monies to investigate those non-profits not on board with his agenda. Environmental groups have been especially hard hit.

Today comes word that the scope of Harper repression is expanding. As reported in The Toronto Star, the knock at the door has happened at PEN Canada.

The Canada Revenue Agency has launched a political-activities audit of PEN Canada, a small charity promoting freedom of expression that has criticized the Harper government in the past.

Two tax auditors showed up Monday morning at the tiny Toronto offices of PEN Canada, asking to see a wide range of internal documents.

If you visit their website, you will see the following principles advocated by PEN:

PEN Canada envisions a world where
writers are free to write,
readers are free to read,
and freedom of expression prevails

That the organization advocates for freedoms that are synonymous with healthy societies, of course, makes them the perfect target for Harper retribution, given Dear Leader's demonstrated disdain for such principles.

And a visit to the news section of PEN's website will make abundantly clear why the Harper cabal has sicced the CRA on them:

Privacy Could Vanish if Cyber-Bullying Act Became Law

Groups Seek Human Rights Protections in Canada-Honduras Free Trade Agreement

How Transparent are Canada’s ISPs?

Stephen Harper Must Address Online Surveillance in Canada, says PEN Canada

One can only hope that Pen International will take up the cause. Presumably it is beyond the reach of the cowardly intimidation tactics of our national government.

UPDATE: PEN and its supporters do not intend to go quietly 'into that good night.'

When Israel Says It Isn't Out To Punish Innocent Palestinians, It's Lying - And We Don't Care

Actions speak so much louder than words, especially when it comes to Israel attacking Palestinians.

The current invasion of Gaza demonstrates that Israel’s claims to be targeting Hamas but not the Gaza Palestinian population is an outright lie. That much is blatant from the weapons used.

What weapons? Try water. When you’re targeting the civilian population of an already water-stressed locale the simplest way to turn the screws is to attack their water and sewage infrastructure. Once you deprive them of fresh water and compound that with a collapse of their sewage system, nature will take care of the rest. Every bloodthirsty bastard who laid siege to a medieval castle or town knew that.

Gaza is a lot like one of those medieval towns. Its land borders are sealed by Israel and Egypt. At sea, the Israeli navy maintains an effective blockade. With the exception of a few tunnels, if you’re in Gaza you’re not going anywhere. You might as well be trapped behind stone walls and a portcullis.

But what about the water? Years ago Israel constructed what are known as "trap wells" along the border with Gaza. These wells intercepted the natural flow of groundwater that Gazans relied upon. Worse yet, without that fresh water flow, sea water entered the Gazans groundwater supply leaving it heavily contaminated. As more sea water continues to enter the Gazan water resource it’s only a matter of time.

In the preliminary air strikes that preceded Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza, Israeli air force jets bombed Gaza’s water and sewage plants. That has rendered about 90% of Gaza’s already dwindling water supply unfit for human consumption.

Israel understands the power of the water weapon and its punitive effect on civilian populations. During its ill-fated invasion of southern Lebanon to attack Hezbollah, Israeli jets took out the water and sewage pumping plants of Beiruit, far removed from Hezbollah territory. That wasn’t targeted at Hezbollah. It was targeted at the Lebanese civilian population in a city largely opposed to Hezbollah. Israel likewise attacked and destroyed three Lebanese hospitals and on its way out of the country instituted a 72-hour cluster bomb barrage of the south ensuring a massive supply of bomblets for cattle and farmers and kids to stumble across for years to come.

If there was ever any doubt that Trudeau the Lesser is all Margaret and no Pierre, the proof came through in the Liberals’ stomach-churning praise of Israel for its “commitment to peace.” I really don’t know how you Liberals live with yourselves and that party or the pandering opportunist who trades on what once was a great name.

In a place like Gaza, taking down the water and sewage plants is a form of biological warfare. It’s just a matter of time until cholera sets in. Yeah, Justin, that’s some commitment to peace all right.

MoS, the Disaffected Lib

No Words Needed Here

H/t The Globe and Mail

UPDATED: On Harper's Reign of Terror

Last week, Owen wrote a post he entitled Corrupting Civil Society, a reflection on the Harper war on non-profits that stand in opposition to any of his regime's agenda. I recommend reading it for a good overview of the situation.

In yesterday's Star, three letters articulated three excellent perspectives on this shameful war:

Tories intimidate charities into silence. Who's next? Opinion July 16

One way to deal with the Harperites’ bullying of charities might be for all charitable organizations to renounce their charitable status. Personally, I make most of my donations to non-charities. I figure they are doing the most-needed advocacy work. The deduction I get on my income tax for charitable donations is hardly enough to bother.

Of course, for multi-millionaire Stephen Harper supporters, this would be anathema. They like donating a chunk of money, getting a massive tax rebate from you and me, and having their names in lights on some university or hospital.

It’s time this type of selfish “philanthropy” is stopped. It costs taxpayers huge sums of money, while allowing the 1 per cent to dictate how that money is spent. Let’s end this distortion, and return to real charity. And let’s make the 1 per cent pay their fair share of taxes, while we’re at it.

Kate Chung, Toronto

The Harper government suddenly detects rampant subversion of the charitable tax exemption. Oddly, the concern appears to be less about the extravagant lifestyle of religious charlatans or about politicians siphoning tax free dollars into their campaign chests than about organizations whose good works are not aligned with the government’s agenda. This, according to the government, is illegal political activity.

Wake up Stephen Harper! All charity is 100 per cent political. Charity is voluntary action by citizens to correct the failings of our society. Charities support the needy and disabled at home, fight disease and starvation abroad and work to free political prisoners precisely because government policy is not to act on these urgent social problems.

It is time to acknowledge that charities provide an immeasurable service by patching the policy holes in our social safety net which the government so cheerfully cuts.

Paul Collier, Toronto

Revenue Minister Kerry-Lynne Findlay trots out the old warhorse of “good stewardship over taxpayer dollars” to excuse the government’s latest crackdown on advocacy by charitable groups. “The CRA has a legal responsibility to ensure that charitable dollars, donated by charitable Canadians, are used for charitable purposes,” she says.

Whether we identify as “taxpayers” or “charitable Canadians” — and probably most of us are both — we can all figure out that it makes more economic sense to address the causes of poverty and injustice than to try to remedy the effects.

Susan Warden, Scarborough

As well, a Star editorial applauds the fact that the NDP is finally speaking up about this misuse of the CRA:

The New Democratic Party, worried that voluntary agencies are being silenced, sent a sharply-worded letter to Revenue Minister Kerry-Lynne Findlay this past week. “This program has the appearance of blatantly abusing CRA (Canada Revenue Agency) resources to target those who do not agree with government and compromises the very integrity of CRA,” wrote NDP revenue critic Murray Rankin and environment critic Megan Leslie.

They called for an independent, external review to determine whether the government is using the muscle of the tax department to crack down on human rights advocates, environmentalists and anti-poverty activists.

While this demand is likely to be met with the Harper cabal's usual disdainful disregard of opposing views, it is at least heartening that with both the press and some politicians speaking up, more of the general public will learn of the profoundly anti-democratic and cowardly nature of their national government.

UPDATE: For a very comprehensive discussion of the problem, check out this post at Desmog Canada, which explores a new analysis by former journalist and graduate student Gareth Kirkby.

Richard Dawkins Says "Mild Pedophilia" Does No Harm

Scientist and atheist campaigner, Richard Dawkins, says it was “no harm, no foul” when a school master pulled young Dawkins onto his lap, shoved his hands down the boy’s pants and fondled him.

“Richard Dawkins attempted to defend what he called ‘mild pedophilia,’ which, he says, he personally experienced as a young child and does not believe causes ‘lasting harm.’

“Dawkins went on to say that one of his former school masters ‘pulled me on his knee and put his hand inside my shorts,’ and that to condemn this ‘mild touching up’ as sexual abuse today would somehow be unfair.

“’I am very conscious that you can’t condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours. Just as we don’t look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism. I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can’t find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today,’ he said.

“Plus, he added, though his other classmates also experienced abuse at the hands of this teacher, ‘I don’t think he did any of us lasting harm.’”


MoS, the Disaffected Lib

A True Critical Thinker

For many decades Noam Chomsky has been fearlessly fighting for truth. His capacity for incisive critical thinking and unwillingness to submit to the bluster of the right is much in evidence in this excerpt from a 1969 edition of William Buckley's Firing Line. Would that today's progressives were as tenacious.

Enjoy:



h/t The Knowledge Movement

A Conspiracy Of One

It’s not uncommon for an RCMP Commissioner to jump through hoops at Stephen Harper’s bequest.

We saw that when Zaccardelli gave Harper a leg up to victory by conjuring up an empty scandal about Ralph Goodale in mid-election campaign. Ominously for a country based on the rule of law, Zac refused to explain his actions afterwards, defying the demands of Parliament for answers.

Now we have Commish Paulson who seized the Duffy-Wright-Harper scandal at the outset with an iron fist. Paulson’s leaked e-mail in which he absolutely forbade his senior officers from having contact with opposition parliamentarians without his express prior consent pretty much established that the investigation and any eventual prosecutions were going to be decided from the top, no questions asked.

Then the circus began. First, RCMP investigators opined that the $90,000 ‘gifted’ by Nigel Wright to Mike Duffy was a bribe. Then they announced that Nigel Wright, who put up the money for the bribe, would not be charged. Then, after a suitable interval and in the middle of the summer recess (Stephen Harper’s preferred time for doing these things), it was announced that, while Wright was still off the hook, Mike Duffy would be charged with accepting a bribe.

Paulson hasn’t explained how he jumped through that hoop. It’s been left to others to speculate that investigators could not conclude that Wright had given Duffy the money with a “corrupt intent” but were satisfied that Duffy accepted the gift with a “corrupt intent.”

Wait a minute. On what possible basis did the Royal Conservative Mounted Police absolve Nigel Wright of any corrupt intent? They had to have done it by isolating all the surrounding circumstances. They excluded the other elements of the “deal” from the cash payment. We know what that deal was because Duffy was foolish enough to put it all in an e-mail to his confidantes. It was that e-mail, leaked to a reporter, that triggered the scandal. We know what that deal was because the elements of the deal Duffy described all came to pass.

Wright didn’t just hand Duffy $90,000. The money came with strings attached, bundled into a deal. Duffy was ordered to keep his mouth shut and to refuse to cooperate with the auditors appointed by the Senate to report on expense irregularities. There’s the corruption the RCMP doesn’t want to acknowledge. But wait, there’s more. Duffy wasn’t just getting cash. The guys who conjured up what the cops say, in respect of Duffy was a bribe, also promised to see to it that the Senate audit report on Duffy would be laundered. They did and it was. There’s the corruption that the RCMP has to do backflips to ignore. The bribe was the whole deal.

That Nigel Wright wrote a cheque on his personal account is irrelevant. The PMO gang tried to get the money elsewhere – from the Conservative Party’s cache - and they almost succeeded. Only when that fell through did Wright step in with his own cheque after clearing the deal with Stephen Harper. Would it have been a bribe if the cash came from CPC funds but not when Wright had to step in with his own money?

By looking at Wright’s cheque in isolation, the Royal Conservative Mounted Police are blatantly whitewashing the involvement and culpability of everyone except Stephen Harper’s target, Mike Duffy. No wonder Paulson put his senior officers under a gag order.

This deal oozes corruption throughout the PMO to the prime minister to the Tory Senate leadership to the Senate audit committee to the Conservative Party. The measure of the integrity of the RCMP lies in its ability to sweep all of that under the carpet even after the facts are out in the public.

We know better. We know this prosecution has been tailored to take Nigel Wright, Benjamin Perrin, Stephen Harper, Senators Gerstein, LeBreton, Tkachuk and Stewart-Olsen, and Arthur Hamilton off the hook. This is the doing of the prime minister’s partisan state police apparatus and it harkens back to another time on another continent.

If it was valid to jettison the Canadian Airborne Regiment after the Somalia scandal (and, for the record, I’m not convinced it was), then this sorry affair surely warrants dismantling the RCMP. There’s no place in a democracy for a partisan political state police agency. From the barn burnings in Quebec in the 60s to this I’ve certainly had my fill of these rogue operators.

MoS, the Disaffected Lib

More On Duffy

Like many others, I have been trying to fathom how Nigel Wright has escaped without charges for the cheque he wrote to Mike Duffy, while the latter has been charged with accepting a bribe. I have also been attempting to get video of two programs, Power and Politics and last Thursday's At Issue Panel, which discuss this mystery in some detail. Unfortunately, CBC no long seems to offer the embed code for their shows, but you can watch the P&P show by clicking here. I was able to find the second show on You Tube, and you can view it below.

Perhaps, like me, you will find the proffered explanations for Wright's 'get-out-of-jail-free card' less than edifying.

Holding Our 'Leaders' To Account

It is almost impossible, I think, to feel anything but a dark impotence when it comes to world events today. Wherever we look, be it the Ukraine, Africa, the Middle East or our own backyards, death, despoliation and injustice prevail. At times, it seems assuming the fetal position is the only reasonable response to a world out of control.

Yet, even when there seems little we can do to ameliorate the world's suffering, there is something all of us can do - refuse to be silent and passive in the face of atrocity - refuse to make it easier for those with power to have their way - refuse to allow them to commit their atrocities in our name.

Clearly, that spirit of defiance is at work in today's letters to The Star, a few of which I reproduce below:

Re: ‘Hamas has no interest in peace,' Baird says, July 16

Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird’s condemnation of Hamas and his unconditional support of Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Gaza ought to be appalling for anyone with a modicum of consciousness. What happened to the Canada known internationally known as a soft-power participating in peaceful resolutions for world conflict?

Would Mr. Baird and his boss, Stephen Harper, be as critical of the victims’ struggle for nationhood if they were the ones helplessly watching their hopes for a homeland on just over 20 per cent of what Palestine was before 1948 being progressively confiscated by Israel while living in a concentration camp called Gaza?
Should they, instead, not be working toward brokering ideas for a two-state solution so that Israelis can leave in peace and without collective guilt for the genocide taking place and the Palestinians can once again be a sovereign people as they rightly deserve?

Carmelinda Scian, Islington

One wonders how Baird can walk through the front doors at Foreign Affairs each morning knowing the whole building is laughing at him behind his back. The pantheon of poorly educated cretins appointed by Harper to cabinet has destroyed 105 years of solid partnership and respect with the world.
Now that Canada advocates (and demands others advocate) state murder in Palestine of women and children, are we any different from Vladmir Putin who presides over the deaths of thousands in Syria purely for the purpose of arms dealing.

Surely we’ve murdered enough Arabs for our selfish want of oil and our kook obsession with Israel.

Bryan Charlebois, Toronto

How dare our prime minister give Canada’s pledge of “unequivocal” support to a nation that has in recent days killed over 150 civilians. Israel claims to be defending itself from rocket attacks that have amounted to one civilian death.

Stephen Harper, you do not speak for all Canadians in giving unconditional support to a nation that is okay with home demolitions, bombing residential areas, destroying schools and hospitals, killing children and unarmed civilians. We cannot give unequivocal support to anybody, let alone a nation known for its human rights violations.

Harper represents the citizens of Canada, not his personal political affiliations. He must not put the blood of innocents on the hands of Canadians through unconditional support of this nation.

Arsheen Devjee, Edmonton

Harper and Baird abandoned any pretense of objectivity on the Israel/Palestinians file when they allowed themselves to be feted as Negev Dinner honorees. Their motives in doing so were to keep the generous donations coming to the Conservative Party of Canada from many Canadian Jews who have come to take for granted their knee-jerk praise of Israel, right or wrong.

Ron Charach, Toronto

A Little Something For Your Friday Evening Enjoyment

When it comes to Mike Duffy, the hits keep on coming. Enjoy:

About That Invasion Of Gaza

To hear our political leaders tell it – the sorry lot of them – Israel is right to yet again invade Gaza. The Palestinians have it coming. It’s all the doing of Hamas.

It’s a convenient and cowardly political posture. Harper probably believes it. Trudeau and Mulcair? Expedience, sheer craven expedience.

Nathan Thrall, senior analyst with the International Crisis Group, has an op-ed in The New York Times, entitled, “How the West Chose War in Gaza. Gaza and Israel: the Road to War, Paved by the West.” The Palestinians, he writes, were on the road to forming a “consensus government” until Israel, with the tacit backing of the west, derailed it.

In the new political Canada we choose the good guys and, by default, the bad guys. The good guys (usually the powerful side) can do no wrong, the bad guys deserve whatever they get.

And when the good guys do bad things, we just look the other way. Harper, Trudeau, Mulcair – if you think one of them is fit to run this country, you’ve got a damned poor regard for this country.

MoS, the Disaffected Lib

UPDATE: Of course Canada’s political weasels will proclaim that Israel is only rampaging through Gaza to get at Hamas. That’s why the Israelis have destroyed Gaza’s water and sewage plants.

The eight-day assault has caused massive damage to infrastructure and destroyed at least 560 homes, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) said. “Within days, the entire population of the Strip may be desperately short of water,” Jacques de Maio, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) delegation in Israel and the occupied territories, said in a statement. If hostilities continue, just as temperatures soar in the region, “the question is not if but when an already beleaguered population will face an acute water crisis”, he said. “Water is becoming contaminated and sewage is overflowing, bringing a serious risk of disease,” de Maio added.

While Harper Fiddles, Canada Burns

There have been so many developments on the climate front of late that, collectively, give us a pretty stark warning and yet the media, the public and our political leadership are tuning out. We seem to be culturally embracing a sort of Andean fatalism that seems to precede abrupt civilizational decline. Perhaps we’re hampered by the fact that it’s a moving target that repeatedly exceeds our ‘worst case scenarios’. Far from being pessimists we constantly underestimate the onset of climate change even as severe events increase in frequency, intensity and duration. Maybe that’s why Harper (and his rivals) aren’t coming forward with any meaningful responses. They’re all avowed fossil fuelers and, having staked out that turf, any significant reduction in Canada’s GHG emissions would have to be borne by every other sector of the economy and the Canadian people. Who would risk the public wrath when pretending to act and doing nothing remains an option? There’s a rank and dangerous cowardice that runs through the Conservatives, the Liberals and the New Democrats alike. God save the Queen. The Canadian people can fend for themselves.


The other day came news of a mysterious crater in Siberia that Russian scientists determined was caused, not by a meteorite, but by an eruption of subsurface gas released by thawing permafrost – a global warming event. We’ve known for several years that the ancient permafrost that girds the high north was “perma” no more. The tundra was drying out, catching fire, and exposing the permafrost below that it once shielded. The permafrost was a sink for massive quantities of the potent greenhouse gas, methane, or, as the energy industry calls it, natural gas.

On the heels of the Russian crater story comes a report from Climate Central about fires spreading unchecked across the Northwest Territories.

“The amount of acres burned in the Northwest Territories is six times greater than the 25-year average to-date according to data from the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center.

“Boreal forests like those in the Northwest Territories are burning at rates "unprecedented" in the past 10,000 years according to the authors of a study put out last year. The northern reaches of the globe are warming at twice the rate as areas closer to the equator, and those hotter conditions are contributing to more widespread burns.

“The combined boreal forests of Canada, Europe, Russia and Alaska, account for 30 percent of the world’s carbon stored in land, carbon that's taken up to centuries to store. Forest fires like those currently raging in the Northwest Territories, as well as ones in 2012 and 2013 in Russia, can release that stored carbon into the atmosphere and contribute to global warming. Warmer temperatures can in turn create a feedback loop, priming forests for wildfires that release more carbon into the atmosphere and cause more warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's landmark climate report released earlier this year indicates that for every 1.8°F rise in temperatures, wildfire activity is expected to double.”

The Climate Central report indicates that the massive amounts of airborne soot from these forest and tundra fires could accelerate the melting of the Greenland ice sheet far faster than we had ever imagined, perhaps by the end of this century. Ice, being white, reflects most solar energy back into space. Soot, being black, absorbs the solar energy and it passes into the ice beneath, causing melting. The melt run-off should wash away the soot except that these fires just keep adding more soot. And, of course, the fires that generate the soot also release ever more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. Forest fires release the CO2 from the trees. Tundra fires release CO2 and expose the permafrost below that releases methane.

As for the Greenland ice sheet and the prospect of losing all or most of it by the end of this century, here’s what you need to bear in mind. When that ice sheet is gone, and it will eventually, it will create 23-feet of sea level rise. You’ve probably seen plenty of graphics of what three or four feet of sea level rise will mean around the world. The reality is that we tend to build our major cities where there’s navigable water. In Canada that’s Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. With Lake Ontario at 75 metres above sea level, Toronto should be safe from inundation but Montreal, on the St. Lawrence and at 6 metres is vulnerable and, as for Vancouver, well let’s just say that False Creek, Coal Harbour and Burrard Inlet will be a whole lot bigger and the Lower Mainland an awful lot smaller.

So, with the prospect of runaway climate change steadily worsening, with major population centres and critical infrastructure at increasing risk, surely this must be at the very top of our Lord and Master’s priority list, right? What’s that, no? His priority is flogging as much of the world’s highest-carbon oil as quickly as he can push through the pipelines and supertanker ports to carry it, really? Surely the opposition parties are going to shut this down as soon as the voting public gives Harper the boot, right? Wrong? Oh dear. Maybe it’s time to caulk the dinghy.


MoS, the Disaffected Lib.

A Blast From The Past

I am sure that some politicos would prefer certain things remain buried in what seems to be a collective public amnesia. Thankfully, the Internet is the gift that just keeps on giving, as this piece from Press Progress reminds us:

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A Darwin Award Contender?

Given that we are in the midst of summer, a little change of pace seems in order. Read this story and watch the accompanying video to see if the developer of a rather unusual homemade pesticide solution merits consideration for a Darwin Award nomination.

UPDATE: Things Should Really Start To Get Interesting Now

As just reported by the CBC, the RCMP has decided to lay charges against disgraced Senator Mike Duffy. Let's hope the 'fat lady' sings loudly:


UPDATE: The Puffster is facing 31 charges.

From The Climate-Change File: The Signs Are Getting Increasingly Ominous

A note from The Mound of Sound with the header, The Tundra's a poppin' alerted me to this strange tale from the far north in Siberia, where a giant crater has appeared.

Says the Mound:

Russian helicopter crews stumbled across what appears to be an 80-metre wide crater in Siberia. They thought it might have been a meteor. Wrong. Russian scientists believe it was gas, probably methane, from melting permafrost that formed a bubble and finally blew up. The helo crew posted a great video of it on YouTube. No one has any idea how deep the hole is but it’s obviously very, very deep.

Makes you wonder if this is a fluke or if we’ll be seeing these in our high north before long. It also begs the question of how much highly pressurized methane must have been released into the atmosphere.


Maybe this dramatic event will... nah, this ominous sign of climatic disaster won't make any difference in the policies of our overlords.

Did She Really Say That?

I have a measure of sympathy for Irene Hubar, who reportedly spent over $1 million to refurbish a building in Hamilton's downtown core, only to encounter difficulty in leasing it out to commercial interests. In her view, the problem is with the 'street people' who loiter outside, scaring away potential tenants that she is trying to attract.

However, her outrageous assertion to a city hall task force, which you will hear at the beginning of the following clip, goes far beyond anything a democratic and free society could ever countenance, but it is one, I suspect, that the corporate agenda would wholeheartedly embrace:

Updated:Do They Not Get Any Canadian News In Peru?

I had to wonder after reading this story and watching the video below. After all, asserting to be Mike Duffy's daughter is not something that most people would claim, given the porcine senator's domestic notoriety:

UPDATE: Macleans seems to have removed the embed code for the video, but you can still see it by clicking on the story link above.

A Mound Of Sound Guest Post: Climate Change By The Numbers

One of the great malignancies of the 20th century was the spread of neo-classical economics. the macro- and micro-stuff that you probably had to learn in university.

I did a good bit of fraud work in my legal career. One of the key ways to unravel a well-crafted fraud was to ferret out the inconsistencies, the gaps, the irreconcilable contradictions. Neo-classical economics, being a work of fraud, also is replete with inconsistencies, illogic and irreconcilable contradictions, but it bundles them all up and jettisons them under the category of “externalities.” It’s sort of like your teenager shoving all the dirt and debris under the bed before proclaiming his room ‘clean’ before demanding the keys to the family car.

The use of externality is a dandy way of keeping incidental costs off the balance sheet. Carbon emissions? An externality. Impacts on climate change, ditto. Deaths in the hundreds of thousands? That too.

In yesterday’s Guardian there’s an item that reveals the face of climate change since the 1970s in 8 charts. It’s taken from a UN study.

What is most telling are two bar graphs toward the end of the article. One of these is titled, “Disasters ranked by reported deaths (1970-2012)”. The countries that dominate that list are Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Mozambique – essentially the Third World. The other is entitled, “Disasters ranked by economic losses (1970-2012)”. Here the top players are Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, Andrew and Ike along with flooding in China and Thailand.






What this reveals is that for the Third World, climate change is a matter of life and death. For the developed and developing countries, it’s an economic problem. Economic challenges are approached from a “cost/benefit” basis. That’s where externalities, such as all those Third World deaths and suffering, come into play. Even though the industrialized world is responsible for almost all of the greenhouse gas emissions since the Industrial Revolution that are wreaking death and suffering in the Third World, we externalize that. We keep it off our books. It’s not relevant.

What have we become?

Giving Credit Where It Is Due

Over the years on this blog, I have been deeply and justifiably critical of the excesses of unfettered capitalism. Degradation of the environment, activities contributing to widescale climate change, and exploitation of labour have been some common targets. Yet every so often, something comes along to show that not all businesses are based on such a rapacious and monolithic model.

In yesterday's business section, The Star reported on a number of enterprises that puncture the myth that paying ones's employees more than the minimum wage is a shortcut to bankruptcy, a favoured assertion of the right.

One of those enterprises is Coffee Pubs,

where the starting wage is 50 cents higher than Ontario’s $11 an hour minimum wage. Full-time staff can start earning an ownership share in the company after six months of service. The business has also expanded to include bartending and catering services. It has 16 employees; workers start at $11.50 an hour and qualify for medical and dental benefits after three months. Managers earn about $30,000, and the Cluleys, the husband and wife owners, say they pay themselves slightly more.

A small company with only two location, Coffee Pubs's decision to depart from the conventional pay model is a bold one, given that employee remuneration in a small operation is a much greater factor in overall costs than in large enterprises.

So why did they do it? Both serendipity and social conscience seem to have played roles.

Their first site, at Bloor and Bathurst in Toronto, is leased from The Centre for Social Innovation, which offers rents geared to revenue. Their second venue is at Artscape Youngplace, a collaborative public space in a former elementary school that’s home to artists’ studios, galleries and an Ontario Early Years Centre.

The Cluleys say that their advantage comes from the strong relationships they’ve forged with local vendors, tenants and walk-in customers from the surrounding neighbourhood. They estimate they have about 100 to 150 customers each day and about half of them work in the building.

The other part of the equation is their philosophy:

“We could use cheaper ingredients and pay the staff less and make more money. We know that this way isn’t going to get us wealthy but we believe in the model,” Erin said.

“We believe if we are patient, we can make a big difference. We want to show there’s another way to run a business that’s not just profit for its own sake.”

The article includes reference and links to other organizations promoting similar values, but on a larger scale, such as B Corporation and Wagemark Foundation.

Like industry leaders including WestJet and Costco, more and companies are discovering that treating employees with dignity, respect and decent wages has tangible benefits:

They argue firms that create high-quality, well-paying jobs and treat their workers better will have a more loyal and engaged workforce, leading to better bottom lines, and better end results for everyone.

We can only hope that this model, which in many ways is the antithesis of the rapacious and unfettered capitalist one widely practised today, ultimately becomes the norm. We, of course, can do our own part by patronizing such enterprises and spreading the word about them with any means we have at our disposal.

Message From Orwell: "I Warned You" - A Mound Of Sound Guest Post

You don't have to dig very deep to get a pretty clear picture of the decline of today's global civilization. The good times are gone, over, finished. We're out of stuff, plain and simple. The game today is for one select group of people to employ its considerable advantages to mine the remaining wealth out of everyone else. We've become the last, best natural resource and the system has been rigged to effect the greatest unearned transfer of wealth ever. It has symptoms - inequality of income, of wealth and of opportunity; the wholesale theft of political power through "capture" of legislators and, in the US, even its courts; media organizations that now serve the power they once confronted; widespread and probably irreversible environmental degradation; secrecy and the triumph of the surveillance state.

Some of us have joined outfits such as Dark Mountain, a place for those tired of the lies civilization tells itself. It's a meeting place for people who know that the game is rigged and that most of the opposition is shadow boxing.

Alternet's John Pilger writes that, "The world we've constructed is far beyond George Orwell's worst nightmare."

"As advanced societies are de-politicized, the changes are both subtle and spectacular. In everyday discourse, political language is turned on its head, as Orwell prophesied in '1984.' 'Democracy' is now a rhetorical device. Peace is 'perpetual war'. 'Global' is imperial. The once hopeful concept of 'reform' now means regression, even destruction. 'Austerity' is the imposition of extreme capitalism on the poor and the gift of socialism for the rich: an ingenious system under which the majority service the debts of the few."

Go back and read that brief passage again. Do you seriously disagree with anything Pilger observes? If not, what does that tell you? Pilger continues:

"In politics as in journalism and the arts, it seems that dissent once tolerated in the 'mainstream' has regressed to a dissidence: a metaphoric underground. When I began a career in Britian's Fleet Street in the 1960s, it was acceptable to critique western power as a rapacious force. Read James Cameron's celebrated reports of the hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll, the barbaric war in Korea and the American bombing of North Vietnam. Today's grand illusion is of an information age when, in truth, we live in a media age in which incessant corporate propaganda is insidious, contagious, effective and liberal."

Do you honestly believe that the Liberals today are not committed vassals to corporatism? Hell, so is Mulcair's crowd. Here's the thing. Ask yourself whether a healthy democracy can co-exist with a corporatist state. It's no accident that the House of Commons is stuffed with petro-pols on both sides of the aisle. I'll conclude with one final passage from Pilger's excellent essay. In his concluding paragraph Pilger points out how easy it is for all of us - you and me - to be corrupted.

"In the 1970s, I met Leni Riefenstahl and asked her about her films that glorified the Nazis. Using revolutionary camera and lighting techniques, she produced a documentary that mesmerized Germans; it was her 'Triumph of the Will' that reputedly cast Hitler's spell. I asked her about propaganda in societies that imagined themselves superior. She replied that the 'messages' in her films were dependent not on 'orders from above' but on a 'submissive void' in the German population. 'Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie' I asked. 'Everyone' she replied, 'and of course the intelligentsia.'"

Are you part of a 'submissive void'? From what I've learned over the past seven years of many people who frequent these sites, there's a damned good chance you are. Think on it.

The Lethal Dysfunction Of The Far Right: A Mound of Sound Guest Post

Problem: you're already getting hammered by early-onset climate change. Solution: deny it's happening, look the other way, think happy thoughts.

It sounds ridiculously dysfunctional and it is but that is the approach being taken by governments, state and municipal, in parts of the American south.

Take North Carolina, for example, where the uber-rightwing state legislature has found a solution to scientific projections of at least a metre of sea-level rise this century - pass legislation banning any mention of that.

And then there's posh Miami, Florida where real estate prices are sky high and still climbing. Miami now floods regularly and there's nothing anyone can do about it. The problem is that the city is very low-lying and it sits atop a dome of porous limestone through which rising sea water passes virtually unobstructed. Seawalls and dikes don't work here because sea water simply comes up from underneath. The city already stands defenceless against seasonal high tides and regular storm surges.

Philip Stoddard is particularly well-placed to judge what is happening in Miami. Tall, thin, with a dry sense of humour, he is a politician, having won two successive elections to be mayor of South Miami, and a scientist, a biology professor at Florida International University.

"The thing about Miami is that, when it goes, it will all be gone," says Stoddard. Nor will south Florida have to wait that long for the devastation to come. Long before the seas have risen a further three or four feet, there will be irreversible breakdowns in society, he says. "Another foot of sea level rise will be enough to bring salt water into our freshwater supplies and our sewage system. Those services will be lost when that happens."

"You won't be able to flush away your sewage and taps will no longer provide homes with fresh water. Then you will find you will no longer be able to get flood insurance for your home. Land and property values will plummet and people will start to leave. Places like South Miami will no longer be able to raise enough taxes to run our neighbourhoods. Where will we find the money to fund police to protect us or fire services to tackle house fires? Will there even be enough water pressure for their fire hoses? It takes us into all sorts of post-apocalyptic scenarios. It makes one thing clear though: mayhem is coming."

Yes, mayhem is coming. So how are Florida's rightwing leaders responding?

"...what really surprises visitors and observers is the city's response, or to be more accurate, its almost total lack of reaction. The local population is steadily increasing; land prices continue to surge; and building is progressing at a generous pace. ...signs of construction - new shopping malls, cranes towering over new condominiums and scaffolding enclosing freshly built apartment blocks - could be seen across the city, its backers apparently oblivious of scientists' warnings that the foundations of their buildings may be awash very soon.

"Not that they're alone. Most of Florida's senior politicians - in particular Senator Marco Rubio, former governor Jeb Bush and current governor, Rick Scott, all Republican climate-change deniers - have refused to act or respond to warnings ...or to give media interviews to explain their stance, though Rubio, a Republican party star and possible 2016 presidential contender, has made his views clear in speeches. 'I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it. I do not believe the laws that they propose we pass will do anything about it, except it will destroy our economy.'"

Miami, in fact the entire state of Florida, is an invaluable object lesson, a miners' canary to demonstrate rightwing dysfunction at work in the fight against climate change. It's one but just one of several spots in the US expected to be particularly hard hit by global warming. Another is the American southwest from California through to Texas.

In already hot and dry Phoenix, Arizona, they're being warned to expect 10-degrees Fahrenheit warming this century. That translates from an average summer high temperature of 104 soaring to Kuwait City temperatures of 114F. In a region already severely water stressed, heating on this scale could undermine the major cities.

"Climate Central used the IPCC predictions - which generally estimate that summer high temperatures will be seven to ten degrees higher by 2100 - to make an interactive map to compare the current temperatures with cities that already experience those temperatures. For example, Sacramento will feel more like Tucson in the summer. Boston will feel like Miami. And Austin, where the average summer high is currently about 94 degrees, is projected to be more like Gilbert, which has an average summer high of nearly 104 degrees.

Meanwhile, on the clean, renewable energy front, Aviation Week has recently published several articles about space solar power (SSP). The idea is to capture solar energy in near-Earth space, convert it to microwaves and them beam the energy down to power grids on the surface.

“Space solar power has as a concept never been more appealing and more promising than it is right now,” says John Mankins, a Jet Propulsion Laboratory veteran who spent a decade as manager of advanced concepts studies at NASA headquarters. “The new technical architecture, which exploits all of the technological advances of the past 30 years in terrestrial technology—electronics, robotics, materials—makes the approach to space solar power both affordable and scalable.”


Maybe, maybe not. At the very least, though, it's a technology worth exploring.

Oh, And One More Thing

It seems I, Martin Regg Cohn and Cheri DiNovo aren't the only ones to take issue with Andrea Horwath's leadership these days:

Re:Horwath admits ‘bittersweet’ election result, July 9

I wonder what Robin Sears has to say about Cheri DiNovo. The day Andrea Horwath walked away from the Liberal budget I cancelled my membership in the Ontario NDP. This decision was not taken lightly. I worked in my first election in Grade 9 and was a member of the party for decades. When the famous letter of “the 34” was made public, I felt better. Others were also disappointed at the move away from core NDP values to populist austerity rhetoric.

Then, enter Robin Sears. He dismissed all of us as over-the-hill, negative and anti-party. And now we have Cheri DiNovo saying “we can’t ever give up our core values and principles.” I hope there are more like DiNovo and fewer like Sears in the party. If that proves to be the case I will return to the fold. I voted Liberal and I respect Kathleen Wynne but I am not a Liberal because I don’t share their core values and principles.

Peggy Stevens, Newmarket

Andrea Comes Down From Her Perch

But only a little bit. And only because her campaign is being criticized from within.

As I noted in a recent post, Ontario NDP leader Andrea's Horwath's hubris following what almost everyone else would call a failed Ontario election campaign has been both unseemly and wholly unjustified. She initially avowed that she had no regrets about causing the election, terming it a success despite the fact her party lost key Toronto ridings and, more importantly, the balance of power. However, now that she is being publicly taken to task by both Peter Julian and Cheri DiNovo, Horwath seems to be tempering her pridefulness:

After weeks of downplaying the defeat at the hands of Premier Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals on June 12, which saw the New Democrats lose the balance of power in a minority legislature, Horwath on Tuesday conceded “the result of this election campaign was bittersweet.”

“We lost some seats in Toronto, which is very concerning to us. All three of those MPPs were good and it’s troubling that all three lost their seats,” she told reporters at Queen’s Park.

Her admission of error came after DiNovo granted an interview to The Torontoist, in which she described the results for the party as "a debacle from the beginning, from day one”.

DiNovo blamed those results on a wholesale drift from traditional NDP progressive values: poverty, child care, housing, and education.

Pointedly, she observed that "at the end of the day it’s about who we are as a party and what we stand for that we need to look at as New Democrats.”

Showing more understanding of what true leadership entails than Horwath does, DiNovo says the NDP will not regain frustrated supporters by portraying the recent election as progress, which has been the official line—focusing on the fact that the party improved its share of the popular vote by one per cent, and that efforts to attract voters outside of Toronto yielded gains. “It’s important for our voters in Toronto to know that we did not see that campaign as a success” because “I think voters appreciate honesty.”

It appears that, belatedly, Andrea Horwath may be realizing the wisdom of her colleague's insights, but not with any real grace. In today's Star, Martin Regg Cohn says that when the caucus finally met on Tuesday, DiNovo, a United Church minister, was told to take another vow of silence.

Nonetheless, as a response to those criticisms,

... a more contrite Horwath confirmed this week that she is changing her staff — and changed her tone. Where last month she was “proud of the achievements,” this week she scaled back the bravado by acknowledging the “bittersweet” reality in Toronto.

The political reality for all caucus members is sinking in. The spring election they triggered has deprived them of the balance of power, leaving the party destabilized and demoralized.

With the Liberals enjoying a majority for the next four years, the NDP leader has lost her leverage in the legislature. Over the next four months, she must regain her legitimacy within the party.

It is clear that Ms. Horwath has her work cut out for her.

Has Harper Betrayed The West? A Mound Of Sound Guest Post

Recent summer flooding across southern Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba seems to be bringing the reality of climate change home to the people of the prairies and it’s drawing some unwelcome attention to prime minister Harper.

Look, it was bound to happen. You can’t have once-a-century weather disasters arriving every two or three years for very long before even the doubters stop listening to climate change deniers. That, from a glance at some prairie newspapers, seems to be happening at the moment. Postmedia science scribe, Margaret Munro, writes that these summer floods are the new reality for much of western Canada. Reginal Leader-Post columnist, Murray Mandryk, writes that Saskatchewan has to catch up to the fact of climate change.

“But don’t take my word for it. Ask someone like hydrologist John Pomeroy – Canadian Research Chair for Water Resources and Climate Change at the University of Saskatchewan – who has studied the issue for years, including intensive study of the drainage of Smith Creek, which flows near Langenburg along the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border.

“’We have to stop doing what we are doing,’ Pomeroy said in an interview from Alberta, where he is currently studying the impact of mountain run-off into the South Saskatchewan River.

“’Things are happening and they are happening much faster than anyone imagined.’”

Munro highlighted Dr. Pomeroy’s remarks about how the pro-oil/anti-science Harper government has gutted federal hydrology, climate and flood management programmes, leaving the provinces to fend for themselves.

“By July, Smith Creek is usually ‘bone dry.’ Last week it hit a new high as 24.5 cubic metres of water a second roared down the stream.

“[Pomeroy] says heavy winter snow had saturated the soil, which was made even wetter by unusually heavy spring rains. Then the frontal system came up from the US, stalled over southeast Saskatchewan in late June, ‘and pushed it over the top.’ The system dropped more than 150 millimetres of rain in a few days – almost as much rain as normally falls in southeast Saskatchewan all year.

“He says the change in the past decade has been remarkable.

“’Everything we know about hydrology of the prairie appears to be different,’ he says. ‘We never have saturated spongy soils with flow running off farmers’ fields in the midsummer. Never.’

“The situation calls out for a national Canadian strategy and program to improve flood prediction and water management, Pomeroy says, pointing to the US which has more comprehensive systems.

“He says recent cutbacks and, in some cases, the ‘gutting’ of federal hydrology, climate and flood management programs have left the country ill-prepared.

“When it comes to the flood forecasting problem, he says, ‘every province is left on its own, with some doing better than others.’”

Coastal British Columbians know how Harper has betrayed us and left our environment defenceless. Harper has moved the west coast oil spill emergency centre to Montreal. He has shut down many of our Coast Guard stations. He has axed entire departments of Fisheries and Oceans once responsible for monitoring our coastal waters and the health of our marine species. He has stripped navigation regulations and done everything asked of him to facilitate hazardous oil tanker traffic. To us, the fact that Harper has gutted federal hydrology and flood management programmes, leaving the prairie provinces defenceless. is old hat. This is simply another illustration of Harper’s rank ideology at work in betraying the West for the sake of Big Oil only this time it’s Harper’s natural constituents caught in the crosshairs.

Reality is catching up with Harper and even the usually reliable, centre-right media are beginning to speak out. Doubters and deniers are beginning to sound utterly unconvincing, shrill, desperate. Pomeroy might have coined a suitable epitaph for Harper’s conservatism when he said, “Things are happening and they are happening much faster than anyone imagined.”

The Harper Regime Receives Another Judicial Rebuke

Things continue to go from bad to worse on the judicial front for the Harper regime. Funny how those pesky laws get in the way of government ideology, isn't it?

Omar Khadr should be serving his time in a provincial facility and must be transferred from federal prison, the Alberta Court of Appeal ruled Tuesday.

In a blistering assessment of the Harper cabal's tactics, Dennis Edney, Khadr's longtime lawyer, said that the federal government "chose to misinterpret" the international transfer of offenders law.

"We are pleased to get Omar Khadr out of the hands of the Harper government. This is a long series of judgments against this intractable, hostile government.

"It would rather pander to politics than to apply the rule of law fairly to each and every Canadian citizen," Edney said in a statement.

Canada's 'Newspaper Of Record' Further Debases Itself

Currently, The Globe and Mail, the hubristically self-proclaimed newspaper of record and Canada's national newspaper, is embroiled in an ugly labour dispute with its workers.

In a statement issued last week, Unifor, the union representing the workers,

recommended members reject the company’s offer because it would weaken job security, reduce base pay for advertising sales staff and require certain newsroom staff to work on “advertorial” articles paid for by advertisers.

The later concept forms the crux of this post. As explained by Wikipedia, an advertorial is an advertisement in the form of editorial content. The term "advertorial" is a blend of the words "advertisement" and "editorial."

Advertorials differ from traditional advertisements in that they are designed to look like the articles that appear in the publication.

For an excellent examination of this sad devolution in journalism, take a look at Alison's post the other day, with links to a variety of examples that amply demonstrate their insidious nature.

But the Trojan Horse of propaganda can take many forms, not all of which are obvious. Take, for example, an article appearing in yesterday's Globe, purportedly written by Mike Harris, arguably the worst and most divisive premier that Ontario has ever seen. Bearing all the earmarks of a public relations offensive carefully crafted by one of the many arms of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), the piece, entitled Work together on Gateway, for prosperity’s sake, is eerily reminiscent of the advertorial written recently by Martha Hall Findlay, who, with a straight face, conflated the Northern Gateway with national-building.

And, like Findlay's, the Harris advertorial is clearly written with the assumption that the public is infinitely malleable and has a collective memory that is virtually non-existent.

Consider the first paragraph:

Canada is a resource nation. In every region, its natural resource sectors, including mining, forestry, energy and oil and gas, support vital social programs and provide stable, well-paying jobs.

Despite the fact that it evokes a nineteenth-century version of Canada as drawers of wood and hewers of water, it equates resource development with things most Canadians consider vital: jobs and social programs (the latter despite the egregious contempt Harris showed for the concept during his tenure as Premier).

The next part is even more redolent of the kind of revisionism the right-wing is addicted to:

Consider, as just one example, the Northern Gateway pipeline, recently approved by the federal government. Since being proposed more than a decade ago, the project’s journey hasn’t always been easy. It has faced tough criticism. But thoughtful debate has taken place and ideas have been exchanged that have resulted in a better pipeline proposal.

As a former premier, I know first-hand the experience of fighting for economic development for your province and its people, but not to the detriment of local communities and the environment. Receiving social licence for resource projects must be the leading objective for proponents; public input and consultations are paramount.

Yet another bald-faced lie, which this link will amply attest to.

The rest of Harris's encomium for 'prudent and thoughtful' development goes on in a similar vein, and to parse it in detail would make this post far too long. But I hope you will check it out for yourselves; as both an indictment of contemporary journalistic standards at the Globe and as a skillfully wrought propaganda piece that demonstrates what money will buy these days, it is a peerless example.

UPDATED: From The Mound Of Sound: A Basis For Optimism

The Mound writes:

Hi Lorne. I spotted this article in the ‘comments’ section of The Guardian. It’s been a while since I heard anything this encouraging on the climate change front:

It’s something akin to an epidemic. In the Australian state of Queensland, solar power has become cheaper than coal-generated electricity. In fact, solar power would be less expensive than burning coal if coal was somehow provided free. Writing in The Guardian, Giles Parkinson explains Australia’s rooftop solar revolution.

“Last week, for the first time in memory, the wholesale price of electricity in Queensland fell into negative territory – in the middle of the day.

“For several days the price, normally around $40-$50 a megawatt hour, hovered in and around zero. Prices were deflated throughout the week, largely because of the influence of one of the newest, biggest power stations in the state – rooftop solar.

“’Negative pricing’ moves, as they are known are not uncommon. But they are supposed to happen at night, when most of the population is mostly asleep, demand is down, and operators of coal fired generators are reluctant to switch off. So they pay others to pick up their output.

“That’s not supposed to happen at lunchtime. Daytime prices are supposed to reflect higher demand, when people are awake, office buildings are in use, factories are in production. That’s when fossil fuel generators would normally be making most of their money.

“The influx of rooftop solar has turned this model on its head. There is 1,100MW of it on more than 350,000 buildings in Queensland alone (3,400MW on 1.2m buildings across the country). It is producing electricity just at the time that coal generators used to make hay (while the sun shines).

“The impact has been so profound, and wholesale prices pushed down so low, that few coal generators in Australia made a profit last year. Hardly any are making a profit this year. State-owned generators like Stanwell are specifically blaming rooftop solar.”

Parkinson explains that even if coal was free, the energy providers would still have to charge 19 cents per kWh to cover grid costs and overhead whereas rooftop solar is achieving costs of 12-18 cents per kWh and is expected to come down as low as 10 cents per kWh. The forecast is for solar to be installed in 75 per cent of houses and 90 per cent of corporate buildings by 2023.

King Coal still has bags of influence with the neo-conservative Abbott Government and the industry is doing what it can to staunch the spread of solar rooftop power. Fortunately the fossil fuelers and their political minions are waging a battle that’s already lost.

UPDATE: I thought I should update this with an item I found at the Sydney Morning Herald discussing how Australia's rooftop solar dynamic is leaving conventional electricity providers facing a death spiral.

Your Monday Morning Smile

An editorial cartoonist captures a Heritage Moment nicely:

Not So Hard To Understand

This morning's Star reports the fact that Canada's sesquicentennial in 2017 is eliciting something less than enthusiasm from the majority of Canadians living outside of Alberta:

Albertans are far more excited than other Canadians about the looming 150th birthday of the country in 2017, a new poll has found.

A full 70 per cent of Alberta residents intend to take part in the 150th celebrations — much more than the 58 per cent of Ontarians or 31 per cent of Quebecers who said they planned to participate, says the poll, which was carried out by Leger Marketing for the Association for Canadian Studies.

The article goes on to posit possible reasons for the results:

- It could ... be that Albertans are feeling good about the country because of the booming economy in the province, or that one of its own, Calgary MP Stephen Harper, is Prime Minister.

- Only half of the poll respondents in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and the Atlantic provinces and only 56 per cent of those in British Columbia had any plans to celebrate the 150th.

- The poll found that only about two in three Quebecers claim some attachment to Canada

Perhaps there is a simple reason for the lukewarm enthusiasm in most parts of the country: the Canada that we have traditionally known and revered has been rapidly disappearing under the eight years of Harper rule we have been subjected to.

A litany of 'reforms' aimed at stripping away our traditions of civility, generosity, kindness and concern for the collective isn't necessary here. Most of us who follow politics are well-acquainted with them. However, a letter in today's Star captures, I think, one key element in the Harper plan to remake Canada in his soulless image: the silencing of dissenting voices:

Re: Stephen Harper's cowardly silence speaks volumes, June 28

The Harper government’s mealy mouthed response to the outrageous incarceration of journalists by the Egyptian court is understandable. This government is doing everything it can to silence those organizations trying to inform the public about its own outrageous activities.

It is doing its best to destroy the CBC. It has muzzled government scientists. It eliminated funding to human and women’s rights organizations both of which exposed the callous nature of some of its policies. It has tried to destroy unions on behalf of its corporate supporters.

Now it is using Canada Revenue Agency to undermine the activities of charitable organizations such as Amnesty International and the David Suzuki Foundation. By submitting them to long, drawn-out audits they are hampering the work of these organizations by taking up their time and money.

Its record regarding the public’s right to information is disgraceful. This government is spending an additional $7.2 million on top of the $8 million in the budget to harass these organizations because they expose the anti-democratic actions of the government.

Terminating the Parliamentary Budget Officer is an excellent example of how the Harper government is doing everything it can to end transparency.

Bill Prestwich, Dundas

All in all, not much to celebrate domestically these days.

Believe It Or Not

Readers of a certain age will remember an erstwhile popular feature carried in many newspapers, Ripley's Believe It Or Not. Each day we would be invited to view a vignette depicting something bizarre or outrageous that frequently strained credulity:



Were it still publishing such tales, I would offer the following for Ripley's consideration:

A $30,000 donation by TransCanada Corp. to the Northern Ontario town of Mattawa comes with a condition attached — an apparent vow of silence on TransCanada’s business activities.

One of the clauses in the agreement says this:

“The Town of Mattawa will not publicly comment on TransCanada’s operations or business projects.”

Commenting on TransCanada’s business is a sensitive point, as the company has several controversial pipeline projects on the go, in addition to Energy East.

According to Mattawa mayor, James Backer, TransCanada offered the town $30,000 toward a new rescue truck, if it agreed to provide services. (The pipeline runs just outside the town's boundaries.) It was all quite innocent.

But wait; there's more!

The ever-beneficent pipeline giant says that it is all just one big misunderstanding, and that the clause was inserted to protect municipalities from stress:

TransCanada spokesman Davis Sheremata said the no-comment clause was inserted to protect town councils from feeling pressured to support TransCanada projects elsewhere.

“In recent years, we have found that communities we enter into partnerships with have at times been targeted by opponents of our projects in Canada and the United States, and have felt pressured to make public statements on our behalf in support of projects not related to them and sometimes located thousands of miles away,” he said.

“The language in the agreement was designed to prevent municipalities from feeling obligated to make public comments on our behalf about projects that did not impact them and about which they had no experience or knowledge.”

“If the Town of Mattawa or any other municipality expressed a concern that the contract would in any way have limited their ability to take part in a full and open discussion about the Canadian Mainline or Energy East, we would have removed it,” he wrote.

As Ripley's used to say, "Believe it or not, folks."

Andrea Horwath: Her Smugness Takes A Hit

The other day, while watching some reactions to the Ontario Throne Speech, I couldn't help but note a truculent and smug Andrea Horwath, the leader of an NDP party now diminished by her foolish decision not to support a progressive budget, thereby triggering an election that few wanted. She opined that the now-majority Liberal government will have to make massive cuts in order to balance the budget by 2017-18. Indeed, she called the speech a Trojan Horse plan.

Who knows? She may be right, but the fact that she gambled and lost the leverage her party enjoyed in the legislature thanks to her decision to go for the brass ring of power has weakened considerably both her credibility and stature among voters. Perhaps this helps explain these results published in today's Star:

One third of Ontarians think NDP Leader Andrea Horwath should resign in the wake of her recent provincial election defeat, a new poll has found.

The poll, conducted by Forum Research, found 35 per cent believe Horwath, who triggered the election by announcing her party would no longer prop up the minority Grits, should step down as leader, while 43 per cent felt she should stay on and 21 per cent had no opinion.

In terms of personal approval, Horwath has dropped to 28 per cent compared to 41 per cent for Wynne. Last August, Forum found the NDP leader at 50 per cent and the Liberal premier at 36 per cent.

Lorne Bozinoff, the president of Forum, noted that the party got nothing out of Horwath's ill-considered decision to force the election:

They don’t have any more seats than they had going into the election and they lost control of everything,” the pollster said, referring to the NDP’s loss of the balance of power in a minority legislature.

“She took a real hit with the whole election thing and not supporting the budget. It just didn’t go well and I think she really did alienate some of her own supporters, the progressives”.

The article also notes the mandatory review Horwath faces in November, where tradition demands that she get at least two-thirds support from the delegates.

Will she meet that criterion? The NDP has few bright stars in its stable, and considering the real possibility that the Progressive Conservatives will pick a female leader (Christine Elliot is the early favourite), it is unlikely that the NDP will pick a male replacement. The only viable alternative, it seems to me, would be Cheri DiNovo. Currently the MPP for Toronto's Parkdale-high Park, she is a United Church Minister and much more a traditionalist when it comes to NDP progressive values.

So it would seem that the party has some intensive soul-searching to do leading up to the November review.